


Kogarashi

by theoceanpath



Series: Coronavirus Catharsis [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:07:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27470938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoceanpath/pseuds/theoceanpath
Summary: She shivers at the first blast of chill, counting mere weeks— a month— until the homeland is buried under a deluge of frostbite and winter's oxygen-starved fingertips drum a cantata of electrocardiogram noises in her ear. Donning a shield too tiny for an infant and a paper-thin helmet like the farce of a soldier she's become, she shuffles into the fortress resonating with labored breaths and prepares to drive back the unprecedented cold spawning across the land.What awaits is not exactly a battlefield, and that's the worst part of it all.For turtlemom 🐢
Series: Coronavirus Catharsis [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2007124
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	Kogarashi

**[Kogarashi: A chilly wind signaling the advent of winter]**

* * *

_Everyone knows what it's like to have wounds that won't heal_

_How much longer will they last?_

_Everyone is waiting for days without fighting_

_When soldiers in the battlefield remember their mothers' warmth…_

* * *

The rumors begin in January. Someone mentions a wet market. Someone dies. It's a curious tale, but a monstrous bonfire is lapping up a continent down south and warnings crackle to ashes against the backdrop of marsupials burnt to a crisp in the unprecedented inferno. The sky blazes fever red at noon and the world does not end.

By February everyone has a story to tell. Cities locked up, soldiers patrolling the streets, airplanes trapped in tarmac, inconsolable shrieking from apartments as humanity is corralled into pens. Furnaces chew their prey deep into the night. Living room lights go out by the thousand. A country gorges on its own flesh.

March is a different universe. Across the sea, streets yawn for the first time in a century as ragtag armies in faux spacesuits build makeshift forts around town. The earth turns inside out, outside in, twists against its orbit, and finally, _breathes._

She squeezes down her fear until it is small enough to stay put in her chest for a whole shift and dutifully reports to work.

* * *

Weapons of mass inspection.

She spots at least five of them today, enough temperature guns for a Hollywood-style shootout. _Beep beep_ they go, sleek plastic molds tirelessly weeding out the ranks, gunpowder smoke swapped for blaring scarlet on a tiny digital face.

The trigger fires. The next person steps forward.

She readies her shield.

The march of the damned staggers forward in spice-tinged Jakartan heat before her sweaty eyelids. Summoning lights fade from red to green, and as traffic lurches forward only the sharp punch of Freon reminds her sleep-deprived mind that the steel frame separating her from the chaos outside is not, in fact, a Humvee, and this is no concentration camp, and her rescue mission does not involve firearms and hand grenades.

And that tear-shaped droplet surfing down her cheekbone?

Sweat. All of it.

The engine stills. Brakes lock into place. She pushes the door open. It's heavier today than yesterday, much heavier than last week. Maybe someone tacked on lead weights when she wasn't looking. Maybe she's made of straw and jelly now.

She sashays down the catwalk to the minefield— to the _hospital._ She lumbers to the entrance of the hospital. Glass doors do little to hide the drawn-out carnage inside when haunted faces spend the weekends animating a tumbleweed field in her skull. For a brief, taunting second, the undulating blues perched on the gray building exterior transform into the Pacific: she's in scuba diving gear sucking air through the mouthpiece of an oxygen tank and the scene that surrounds her is a hidden paradise of corals, bioluminescence, underwater gems.

The moment passes. The effort of deep breathing refuses to grant the pre-pandemic calm she desperately needs, merely adding to the strain in her diaphragm, her lungs, her chest. She adjusts her mask and purges her thoughts with a flood of Chopin, and in her mind's eye she grips the notes on the staff and wraps them around her arms like a security blanket, hoping that maybe, just maybe, she won't collapse before nightfall.

She's over the threshold before she can curse her superiors for it, for whatever badly written plot device role they've assigned to her in this pandemic. There's the band of heroes, the supervillain they have to team up to defeat, the citizens perpetually in need of saving, and then there's the rest of them— the nameless, faceless, disposable doctors exalted as heroes and cursed like villains in the same breath, who are ultimately the closest thing to zombies history has right now.

Three weeks since the pseudo-lockdown and her life as a healthcare worker feels like standing in the crosshairs of the rifle of a very deranged sniper. She finds herself wishing, not for the first time, for the power to hurl a nuclear bomb at the unseen enemy with her bare hands and just put an end to this before it kills them all.

But that would be _too_ easy. Real stories don't end like that.

Voices fade in and out, muffled. She keeps walking, walking, walking past the throng of coworkers, casting shadows, teetering on the brink of a black hole. One step, two steps, her figure spears through the miasma suffocating No Man's Land and tramples all over it.

* * *

A stuttering breath stops midway, a hand stills, eyes close, technology panics, another soul drifts. A picture of false serenity greets her from the unemptied bed.

One more down, and her shift isn't half over yet.

She ambles down the room and a phone rings and a father mumbles in a voice shaking with so many cracks, _I'll give you the sun the moon the stars, I'll give you rainbow waterfalls and canyons and the treasures of kings and queens at the heart of the sea,_ and another patient turns to her for all the things he's just been promised. She grimaces, grateful for the mask that hides it, and schools the visible part of her face into something peaceful and kind for the dying man to find comfort in. It's the best she can do now— a doctor can only nod and play calm, and whisper a hundred reassurances that may or may not mean a thing.

 _I won't make it, will I?_ his eyes ask, and she does not tell him that the odds of recovering are about the same as finding a tea rose blooming in Antarctica. Which, considering the rate of global warming these days, might not actually be so impossible.

"Doc—"

Another voice. And another.

Her ears snap away, tugged by an elastic wrapped around her ribs and stretched far too thin. She needs a break. She needs a break to _break._

And then she's back in the roughly finished corridor, walking away from the nebula of orchestrated cacophony patient wards have morphed into. If this were a movie, she'd be the tortured teenage girl who throws herself over a bridge mistaking the river below for blueberry jam. And, finding she can swim, she'll haul herself over the grassy bank and the whole scene would be pointless so the scriptwriter would have to find a myriad more ways to attempt to get rid of her again.

Well it's not working. She's still here, and it's been months since the deluge of cases surged to the roof, and she's still here, and the death toll has sickened her enough times to numb her permanently, and she's had a handful of swab tests already. _And she's. Still. Here_.

There has to be a reset button somewhere. Perhaps it's hidden in a vault that only a secret agent can open. Maybe it fell through a fault line and the pressure of a volcanic eruption is needed to activate it.

Either way, she's already stopped looking.

* * *

The sun drizzles through rectangular gaps in cement as airconditioning clashes with midday heat. People scurry around like ants, restless yet determined. It's not a concentration camp, but it sure feels like it.

_Joo, Jury 2002… 2020…_

_Ferrari. Marsh, Ariel, Meh, Dune, Duly, Augoo,—_

The words twist. The walls twist. Sleep is a pot of gold over the rainbow in the Atacama desert. She plods forward mechanically— _left, right, left, right, left, right, wrong_ — ensconced in body armor, observing specters from her tiny bubble. Her membrane-like helmet resembles some kind of jellyfish. Or a mushroom. Something potentially deadly. It probably could be used as a scare tactic for nature's typical predators, but the enemy spawn latches on to the fringes of her modernized coat-of-mail, too small and too powerful for her to annihilate.

Latex and silicone. Disinfectant. Plastic, so much plastic. Hallways. Acrylic forts again. The faucet handle kills. The light switch kills.

She has a dollhouse nestled in her head, and inside the dollhouse is a filing cabinet where she inserts names and dates— death due to complications from coronavirus, death due to complications from coronavirus, death due to _complicated people complicating coronavirus through non-compliance._

"That isn't in the protocol!" she points out one day, horrified.

"There _is_ no protocol!" her coworker snaps back.

She rereads the latest edition of _effective_ and _practical_ government advice, shooting scalpels from her irises, regretting that her eyelids and sockets are too sore to roll her eyes. There are many perfect disasters, and this is the most spectacular one yet.

"Okay," she sighs, in the same breath as _"Are you kidding me?"_ She searches for an adjective to describe this feeling and finds none.

At some point she's giggling unrepentantly behind her respirator because she's cycled through all the other emotions today at least twice and there's nothing left to call forth except the one she's been saving for last. There's probably a rule written somewhere that you're not supposed to laugh in the middle of a pandemic but no one's been following textbook procedures anyway. So laugh she does, to the tune of the very logical, very amazing COVID clean-up that's been going on lately.

They say to the patients: _you die here, and you die there._ And to the doctors: _you break down here, and you break down there_. And to everyone else: _you_ p _retend not to do this, and you pretend not to go there, and we pretend to care._

It's the same way everyday, shatter and stick the shards together with surgical tape, and she's running out of surface area, and she's running out of tape.

* * *

"That was not in the plan," someone grumbles, hours or weeks later.

"There _is_ no plan," she informs the poor lost creature. Who is probably a nurse. And probably quite new. And who probably will be showing signs of PTSD pretty soon.

Another one down, another to go, _right foot, left foot,_ the triage center looms, _tick_ and _tock,_ blank spaces are a relief now. The haze of fear is everywhere, in every breath, every misstep. It's the Spanish Flu all over again; history doesn't need to ask permission to repeat. Her country's fame is whispered throughout Southeast Asia, setting records like the ISU with numbers so dubious they have to be a scam.

The sickness is closing in again, wave upon wave of ambulances and stretchers, forcing her life into a shape she can't identify. Right now she feels like a Lego tower guntacked to a cloud, balancing a jar of honey with goldfish feet. The jar spills over, and she wants to gather all this sticky grief, and wrap it in a handkerchief, and flush it in the toilet.

She can't, of course. Medical politics is simply too sweet not to cause a toothache, and at this rate she'll be digging the whole set out of the gumline with kitchen tongs.

 _When I get home_ , she promises herself with a resigned, utterly exhausted sigh, _I will throw a feast._

* * *

What she gets is dessert and a full stomach and her kids staying up late watching TV and lights off and then the random Zoom meeting turns out to be… interesting.

"He'll drop by later," says Tracy. Coach Tracy. "He wants to see for himself how you guys fight in the frontlines."

She nods, surprised and excited and nervous at the prospect of welcoming their guest this afternoon.

Her gaze drifts to the red-orange neatly piled on Tracy's plate that she can't smell through the laptop screen.

_Prawns._

"Oooh, these are _so_ good," Tracy remarks.

She smiles politely and waits for Yuzu to show up.

* * *

She bears an offering of Chinese broccoli and other greens, carefully cooked and delicately wrapped—on second thought she wonders what exactly possessed her to bring, of all things, a native dish made of veggies harvested straight from the garden, but her mind shuts off the idea as soon as it pops up. She ushers herself inside just minutes before the grand entourage comes in.

Yuzu strides through the entrance in his granite-black jacket, taking time to pose for the half-dozen flashing cameras in the lobby. There could have been more, if only skating were more popular in the country, if Western media didn't keep downplaying his achievements, and the government subsidized more PPE to lessen the burden on local struggling photojournalists. She notices distractedly how Yuzu models that _Clever_ mask very well as he greets everyone in sight with respectful bows and disarmingly sparkling eyes that have charmed millions.

"He's a skater, right?" her colleague shout-whispers.

"Not just any skater. He's the best one out there— the greatest of all time," she replies, careful to curb her enthusiasm as his team unloads donations of boxes of N95s, _Amino Vital,_ and plastic bags full of Poohs.

The stuffed toys make her eyes water. She blinks the salt away discretely. The kids will love these; after the visit she swears to tell them all she can about this secret superhero in their midst. She hopes the smile she beams back can penetrate her mask and convey all the gratitude welling up right now.

He leads and she follows, and he points to a saying on the wall of the outpatient clinic. _"You're stronger than you seem, braver than you believe, and smarter than you think,"_ he reads, and the accent is achingly familiar, yet surprisingly more fluid than she expected. It's been so long since she's seen him compete, and life has changed so much since then.

She isn't the same person she was when he skated _Hope and Legacy_ at Four Continents. She looks through the endless stretch of ocean that doesn't separate them and meets his eyes. His hair is longer than she remembers.

"I like that movie," he says.

"Movie?"

 _"Pooh's Grand Adventure._ It was scary but fun, and a little sad. I enjoyed it."

He's singing Disney lyrics now— _singing,_ not lip-syncing— and in the resulting shock she almost misses the words.

_I've hung a wish, on every star_

_It hasn't done much good so far_

He giggles afterward, a little embarrassed, and the perpetual crashing of the world shudders a final time and halts. Like the spark of a match, or the snap of a sword after centuries of silence, the pressure on her throat eases, the hurricane fades. She blinks. There is someone a culture and a language away who _knows_ what it means to fight with an astronomically miniscule chance of succeeding. And he won. And even when he didn't win, he didn't lose either.

He never went down without a fight. Neither, she resolves, will she.

She takes him to the elevators; they stop at the sixth floor. She finds herself playing tour guide for some reason, but he's the one teaching her. He recites from memory the donning and doffing procedure before she can even direct him to the instructional poster, which is strange because wasn't that her job?

"I researched," he explains.

 _Ah._ Of course he did. He could probably take over one of her lectures without a glitch. This is the math genius who challenged the Quad Axel, after all.

She takes her eyes off the white and black slashing through his Team Japan blazer, and his voice prickles at her ear as she goes through the process extra meticulously today. He'll accept nothing less than perfection in her mummy attire, and if she exceeds his expectations, she'll surely scare the viral spawn away too.

His eyes glow with curiosity and understanding and some glimmer of pride— or maybe faith? She gestures to the antenna sticking out from his hair and inquires when he plans to return to Japan.

She forgets to ask if he managed to land his ideal 4A in practice yet.

* * *

"Mom!" calls her youngest, and the alarm clock jars the seams of her dream journey apart. Yuzu's gone and she has to drive to the hospital again, for real.

She reaches the room and whisks out the additions to her scrubsuit, double checking for rips in fabric the way she always does, except this time there's more feeling in her limbs underneath the gloves and the air isn't as stale as it was before. Maybe it's a good sign. Maybe it isn't. Yuzu's not here now but his strength lingers comfortingly.

She gazes calmly down the hallway. The infinities of uncertainty stare back. She tucks a twinkle of hope into the space in her chest between lethargy and fear and gets to work.

* * *

_In this world that spreads out forever_

_We'll hold back our tears and walk on_

_No matter where it takes us_

_Keep moving forward, don't look back_

_All the way to the future, live on._

**Author's Note:**

> Opening/Closing lyrics: "Rakuen" by Do As Infinity  
> The song Yuzu sings: "Wherever You Are" from _Pooh's Grand Adventure_  
>  Sorry it took so long. I needed a song to power through the whole thing, and I only found it last week. 😅😅😅


End file.
